The him – the man who has now fallen on his sword -  is 35-year veteran McLaren sporting director Dave Ryan who has been at the Woking-based team since 1974, when Lewis Hamilton had yet to bless the world with his lightning-rays of integrity, and Ron Dennis was still tooling around with Rondel Racing.

During the press conference in which Lewis admitted to following orders to mislead,  the British-based media all stood up and gave him a standing ovation for having admitted that – no, I kid you not – he had misled the stewards in Australia because he’d been instructed to do so by Dave Ryan. In Britain, it seems, such conduct is held in high regard. No wonder ‘Casino’ Cassano (the man who brought AIG to its knees – and most of the world’s economy to boot), was working out of London.

But let’s go back a week and quickly set the scene for Lewis’s gut-wrenching confession to the press at Malaysia.

During the yellow flag under which the Australian GP ended, brought out by Vettel and Kubica’s shunt, Trulli – in the midst of an epic drive from pitlane (and last) to third – managed to throw his podium away by sliding wide. This mind-fart promoted Lewis into third, and Trulli – getting back onto the gray stuff – fourth.

And then, strangely, Lewis Hamilton slowed down – and down – and down … until Trulli, thinking Lewis Hamilton had hit a mechanical problem (since it is the law that cars should not go under 80 km/h under the safety-car period, and must keep up with said pace car), drove by into third.

McLaren’s Martin Whitmarsh, at the time, said this to the Telegraph newspaper: “The stewards are currently deliberating and we hope we finished third. Under the last safety car, Jarno Trulli’s Toyota fell off the circuit and was on the grass. Lewis passed as he legitimately can do so. Thereafter Trulli passed under the safety car. The early indications from the stewards are they felt that was incorrect. My gut feeling is it will be third.”

Trulli, of course, saw things from a different angle: “I can’t say how disappointed I am to finish third but have the result questioned,” he said. “When the safety car came out towards the end of the race, Lewis Hamilton passed me, but soon after he suddenly slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road. I thought he had a problem so I overtook him as there was nothing else I could do.”

The FIA, after consulting and acting on Lewis Hamilton’s testimony, penalised Trulli 25 seconds, thereby demoting him to 12th.

During that meeting, held one hour after the end of the race, Lewis Hamilton was asked, according to the FIA {my emphasis}, whether he, Hamilton, “and his team manager, David Ryan, specifically {discussed allowing Trulli to pass and, further, whether Ryan had asked} Hamilton to allow Trulli to overtake. Both the driver and the team manager stated that no such instruction had been given. The race director specifically asked Hamilton whether he had consciously allowed Trulli to overtake. Hamilton insisted that he had not done so.“

Unfortunately for Lewis Hamilton, reigning world champion, the FIA had seen Hamilton’s interview with journalist Adam Cooper after the Australian GP in which it appeared as if Lewis had contradicted his statement to the FIA:  The FIA then got hold of the radio transmission between Lewis Hamilton and his team and found the following {my emphasis}:

Lewis Hamilton: The Toyota went off in a line at the second corner … is this OK?

Team: Understood, Lewis. We’ll confirm and get back to you.

LH: He was off the track. He went wide.

Team: Lewis, you need to allow the Toyota through. Allow the Toyota through now.

LH: OK. He’s slowed right down in front of me.

Team: OK, Lewis. Stay ahead for the time being. Stay ahead. We will get back to you. We are talking to Charlie.

LH: I let him past already.

Team: OK, Lewis. That’s fine. That’s fine. Hold position. Hold position.

LH: Tell Charlie I already overtook him. I just let him past.

To recap then: Lewis Hamilton had let Trulli by. He had discussed this with the team. When asked if he let Trulli through by the stewards, Hamilton lied and said no. When asked if he’d discussed letting Trulli through with the team, Hamilton lied and said no. He lied not once, he lied multiple times.

But did he really lie? McLaren and the British press call this being economical with the truth, and ‘misleading’. Apparently if someone asks you, “Is your name Lewis Hamilton?” and you reply, “No,” and when, moments later, they show you evidence that your name is, indeed, Lewis Hamilton, you have not lied – you have just ‘misled’. Following? Good.

Because where I come from, we call this bare-faced, shameless lying, and the result (and the intent, surely) was to have Trulli penalised for something that was palpably not his fault.

Caught in a lie, Martin Whitmarsh – in typical McLaren-speak – went on the offensive, first blaming Trulli for falling off the track, before blaming the FIA itself: “At the stewards’ meeting, we mistakenly believed that the stewards were aware – Charlie [Whiting] was there, and the FIA was there – of that radio conversation. The stewards now believe that we were not explicit enough about that radio conversation, and felt therefore that that was prejudicial to the decision that they reached. Obviously we regret that, and that was a mistake by the team, but we have got to accept the decision that has now been made.”

In other words, when Hamilton was asked whether he, or whether the team had discussed allowing  Trulli through to third under yellow, and he replied, ‘nope, never happened,’ he was, in fact, not lying: No, he, in fact, knew that the FIA knew about the radio transmission and therefore said no in the sure belief that the FIA would then reply, ‘Yes you did,’ at which point Lewis Hamilton would have said, ‘Fair cop, you’re right!’

Fernando Alonso, who drove for McLaren in 2007, however, wasted no time pouring cold water over Whitmarsh’s self-righteous astonishment: The Spaniard was quick to note that McLaren were lying to the stewards during his tenure at the Mercedes-backed team by confessing that, “Of course it reminded me of 2007. It’s not the first time they go to see the stewards. It’s not the first time they lie to the stewards {either}, and, sooner or later, they had to be punished.”

With the fatuous lies of Hamilton and McLaren now in the open light of day – and no-one aside from the usual conspiracy-artists declaring their innocence (the British media, in the main, and Lewis Hamilton fans) – Lewis Hamilton, no doubt thinking about his reputation, convened a press conference in Malaysia in which he admitted the truth. Or, erm, a version of the truth, anyway.

You see, Lewis maintains that he did not lie. Indeed, he had merely ‘misled’ the stewards by ‘withholding information’ and, what is more, had done so – believe it! – because he had been instructed to do so by Dave Ryan. He was a victim of circumstance, and was – dear God – only following orders (now where have I heard that before?). His confession had the British journalists on their feet applauding this wonderfully honest lad who had been forced to lie to the stewards in Australia {my emphasis}:

“In Melbourne, I had a great race,” Lewis said. “As soon as I got out the car, I had the television interviews at the back of the garage, and straight away I gave them a good account of what happened during the race. Straight after that, we were requested by the stewards, and while waiting for the stewards, I was instructed and misled by my team manager to withhold information, and that is what I did. I sincerely apologise to the stewards for wasting their time and for making them look silly. I am very, very sorry for the situation: for my team, for Dave because he has been a good member of the team for many years, and whilst I don’t think it was his intention or … he is a good guy. I went into the meeting, I had no intention of … I just wanted to tell the story and say what happened. I was misled and that is the way it went. I would like to say a big sorry to all my fans who have believed in me, who have supported me for years, who I showed who I am for the past three years, and it is who I am. I am not a liar. I am not a dishonest person. I am a team player. Every time I have been informed to do something I have done it. This time I realise it was a huge mistake and I am learning from it. It has taken a huge toll on me. I apologise to you guys, I didn’t speak to you yesterday, but there was a lot to take in and a lot to deal with. I am here to apologise to everyone and I assure you it won’t happen again. I’ve never felt so bad. Try and put yourself in my position and understand that, like I said, I am not a liar. I have not gone through my life being a liar or dishonest. And so for people to say I am dishonest and for the world to think that … what can I say?”

Thing is, though, despite Hamilton’s non mea culpa, he is a liar. Whether he is a team player or not doesn’t change the fundamental fact that … he lied. He lied to the stewards. He says he was ‘instructed’ to do so. Which makes him worse, of course, than your typical liar: This liar lies on order. In short, he wants us to believe that he is a thoroughly honest person forced into a lie by Dave Ryan. The question that was not asked by the psychopantic British press was this: “Lewis, how come you didn’t just say no? If you’re such an honest person, why didn’t you just tell Ryan to go swivel on a barge board? Were you afraid of losing your job? Aren’t you the greatest driver to have ever turned a wheel? Were you afraid to lose your drive at McLaren? Were you pressured? Threatened by McLaren to lie? Or did you just say, when asked to lie about one of your fellow competitors, ‘Okay, then’?”

Where was Lewis Hamilton’s sense of honour? His sense of justice? Where was Lewis Hamilton’s conscience? Are we to believe that a world champion grand prix driver who could get a drive – or so the British press would have us believe – with any team on the grid would feel pressure to lie? To blemish his reputation? And are we to believe that Lewis Hamlton is so weak of character that he’d actually lie about what one of his fellow competitors did on the track merely because he was told to do so by Dave Ryan?

Most instructive of all, though, was the exchange between Hamilton and the press when he was asked if h’d spoken to Jarno Trulli, the man who had lost his podium in Australia based on nothing more than Hamilton’s bald-faced lie: “I haven’t had the chance to speak to Jarno. I did actually see him before we went into the meeting and I said sorry for the situation. But …”

Sorry for the situation? What does that mean? Sorry I got caught in a lie? Certainly if he was sorry for lying, he’d have spoken to Trulli long before the whole debacle entered the press: Hell, even I have Jarno’s phone number!

“I said sorry for the situation. But …” But what? But I couldn’t admit I’d lied? What, precisely, would it have cost Lewis Hamilton – the man who says he has never been dishonest – to look Trulli in the eye and say, “I lied, I’ll sort it out.” Not now, of course, but last week: After he’d lied, that is. When he went to his hotel room. Or when he saw Jarno at the airport on the way to Malaysia. Or at the hotel in Malaysia. Or on the track on Thursday. Or Friday. For such an honest person, it sure took Lewis Hamilton a long time to come to the conclusion that he had lied: Funny, actually, how his honesty came to light only after his bald-faced lying was exposed by the FIA and the international press. What a coincidence, eh?

We have learned something about Hamilton this week: We have learned that he will lie, and we have learned that he is not much of a man, either: When caught in the lie, he was more than happy to blame others for having ‘instructed’ him to do so. So what is worse, I wonder? A man who lies – or a man who lies on command?

And for this – for admitting he lied on command – the British press handed him a standing ovation.

For sure this puts a whole new look on the shenanigans of McLaren last year, which eventually saw them fined one hundred million dollars. It seems that, in Lewis Hamilton, McLaren-Mercedes (I wonder if that manufacturer ever instructed its employees to do unconscionable things – you know, ‘I vas only following orders’) have the perfect foil for their own ethics and morals.

And in typical McLaren turn-around, Martin Whitmarsh is no longer on the offensive: “I think that Lewis was not entirely truthful, but we have spoken to Davey. He was the senior member of the team and they went into the situation together.I think they were trying to deal with the situation and they got it wrong – but Davey as the senior member of the team was responsible for what happened and therefore I took the decision this morning {to suspend him}.”

It’s odd, isn’t it, how a team with such impeccable ethics and standards such as McLaren keep finding employees like Mike Coughlin (McLaren’s chief designer who was discovered with Ferrari’s bluprints in his house), and Dave Ryan – really, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the culture fostered at the Woking team. After all, it’s not as if a member of the senior management would instruct one of their drivers or employees to lie now, is it … no, they just got it ‘wrong’.

“We will have to make the most of our race pace and the start: in Australia, we saw that anything can happen and we will have to be ready to pounce on every opportunity, with the obvious proviso that we cannot make any more mistakes.” Stefano Domenicali, the ‘seer of Maranello’, April 4, 2009

“Another disastrous race, and we can’t make any excuses for it. Once again today we tried to second guess what might happen and every time the opposite of what we expected happened and so the race was turned into a continual struggle to make up for that and in the end we finished empty handed.” Luca Baldisseri, April 5 2009

They say he is loved up and down the paddock: They say Domenicali – Ferrari’s director, and his side-kick, track engineer Luca Baldisseri – are ace chaps, for whom all the teams have great esteem. McLaren have stated Ferrari have never been so amiable as a team since Domenicali took over. The British press fall over themselves in praising Domenicali’s easy-going manner and friendly demenour.

If I were a rival team manager, I too would love these two men. Because in the history of F1, there have never been two cretins of such astonishing incompetence, nor two imbeciles capable of reaching such lofty heights of sheer stupidity as Domenicali and Baldisseri.

Here we are not talking about two men who are utterly out of their depth and swimming in an ocean on ineptitude: We are not talking, either, of two men who are as clueless as a newborn trapped in a warzone. No. No, what we are dealing with is an idiocy – a wanton and pure stupidity – a thick-headedness that sees their consistent failure come with a panache and ease that is at once admirable and awe-inspiring. One cannot learn to be this rubbish at what one does: This is genetic, and were Ferrari to look for replacements for these collosal talents, it would take generations to find men of similar stock.

These men have single-handedly presided over the demise of a once-proud team, and have confirmed the stereotype that an Italian could and indeed should not manage anything more complicated than – no, actually, an Italian should not manage.

There is no parallel in any form of sport or business that can compare to the sheer idiocy that these two men have brought to F1: Their ‘management’ of the Scuderia has darkened what was a once great team for whom drivers have paid the ultimate price, and has forever shamed an entire nation … an ineptness which has become, at once, a tragi-comedy that has brought an entire nation to tears, and yet so utterly predictable that Ferrari fans now tune in to races only to watch – with the kind of horrified stupification one generally attributes to a train-wreck – the next installment of the Dumb And Just Plain Stupider show.

When the time comes for ‘strategy’, the question is not – what will Domenicali do this time but – can he possibly outdo the entire litany of stupidity that has come before? And you really need to credit him here because he is the ultimate showman – he never lets you down, never settles for just the casual mistake, the repeated catastrophe: No, Domenicali has the ability to dream up cock-ups of such enormity that mere mortals could not possibly predict. The fact that these disasters are done on the fly, and not carefully considered for weeks – nay, months beforehand – makes Domenicali the idiot-savant of F1 management: The Rain Man of incompetence. Nothing – there is no depth, no idiocy, no stupidity, no incompetence, no tragic mistake that Domenicali will not embrace with total determination, desire, and passion: There is nothing, there is not one single screw-up that remains beyond Domenical’s ability to concoct, on the spur of the moment. None. This man has the instincts of a maggot to fresh faeces.

It all started so well, too: At the end of 2006, these two were promoted to their new roles when Ross Brawn walked away from Ferrari, leaving behind a structure that had seen the Scuderia dominate the last decade of F1 racing, piling on win after win, championship after championship, a juggernaut of success which continued right into 2007: Noting Brawn’s departure had not changed the winning streak, many opined at the time that even a mentally retarded monkey whose brains had been eaten by a tribe in the Congo could win with Ferrari.

But no-one, of course, had reckoned on the Domenicali-Baldisseri show …

Fuji 2007

It had rained for days. Some said it was the start of the deluge, the wages of sin, and men everywhere – those, that is, who had not drowned or been washed away by the vast rivers of water cresting over Japan – were constructing their boats and coupling their yard animals.

The track itself had vanished under a lake of monsoon-season water from a torrential downpour so severe that the race was started behind a safety car. And then we saw it, Domenicali’s vision: There, behind the safety car, slewing off the track, were the two Ferraris, both shod with intermediate tyres …

The FIA – totally perplexed – immediately emailed the Ferrari team and ordered them into the pits to stick on full wets, an act which provoked self-righteous ire from Domenicali: No-one at Ferrari, he insisted, had received official notification from the FIA prior to the start of the race that this was a wet race (which meant it was mandatory for all cars to have full wets). How, Domenical fumed, was he to know it was a wet race? Just because it had rained for 7 days and nights, and just because every session had been run in the rain, just because there was a category 2 typhoon headed toward the track, how – he demanded, his fists pumping at the sky, at the unfairness of it all – how was he to know it was a wet race!

How indeed: The FIA had clearly been terribly presumptuous in assuming that something so obvious as The Great Flood would trigger a cognitive response in the ‘seer of Maranello’. The fact that every other team on the grid had full wets, moreover, was, to Domenicali’s thinking, further proof – if any were needed – that he alone was the visionary, the seer, the man who could see sunshine when all about him saw nothing but rain and typhoons.

Long-suffering tifosi, meanwhile, cared little about the typhoon: What we saw, instead, was the work of a category 5 buffoon.

Monaco 2008

In a race that was changing from wet to dry and back, Massa was in pristine form, easily powering away from the field and looking good for the win. Then Domenicali had a brilliant idea: Get him in early, fill his car up to the brim, and send him out. After all, just because the weather has been variable all day did not mean keeping Massa light and flexible in case the weather changed again was, you know, the obvious choice. Certainly others did so – but others are not blessed with the ability of Domenicali, and so we were treated to the sight of Massa driving around in the Exxon-Valdez for two hours on his way to finishing a minute behind cars he had been pulling away from at a rate of half-a-second a lap.

Silverstone 2008

Pit stops in F1, as Domenicali has amply demonstrated, can be viciously complicated. Remembering to change tyres and refueling can tax even the greatest minds, so imagine how vexing this all is for Ferrari’s chief strategist:  At Silvestone, while Massa spun his way to last in a fantastic display of aerial ballet, Kimi was having one of his ‘on’ days, and victory seemed, if not certain, then certainly not outside the realms of possibility.

When Kimi came in for his scheduled stop on what remained a wet track, and on intermediates, the team, inspired by Domenicali’s brilliance, quickly got to work and sent Kimi out with … no new tyres. Domenicali, post-race, was phlegmatic: “We could have won this race with Kimi … but we made a key mistake at the first stop choosing to stay on the same set of tyres. {…} With hindsight, it’s easy to say we should have changed tyres, but Formula 1 is not an exact science: Sometimes strategic choices pay off, sometimes they don’t.”

What the strategic choice of sending Kimi out on worn tyres was, no-one but the seer from Maranello will ever know. Even Ferrari big-boss Luca di Montezemolo was confused: “I hope we’ll manage to win our eighth title in ten years,” he said.“We will, if we don’t carry on doing stupid things. Obviously I wasn’t pleased with what I saw yesterday, but I hope it’s a useful lesson. Knowing my men, I’m certain it is.”

Problem is, di Montezemolo does not know his men: For Domenicali is a genius, you see, an Einstein-like savant of the pit-lane, and what had happened at Silverstone was a mere glimpse of the magnificent plans he had in store for Ferrari.

Germany 2008

At the very next race, Domenicali’s form continued unabated: With the safety car deployed, Kimi was running in a strong 5th. Foiled by the complexity of working out when the pitlane would open, Domenicali watched with a sly grin as the entire field pitted before he sprang his troops into action, servicing Kimi and sending him out in 12th, almost a lap down.

Race over, and not content with the scale of the disaster he had reigned upon the team, he then presided over the team’s issuing of their official press release to the media … the title of the press release? “British Grand Prix” …

Hungary 2008

Massa is swanning to victory. He has been dominant all day, and with one lap remaining, he could literally afford to drive home in first gear. And then his engine expires. Did the pits warn Massa of impending disaster? Nope, said Massa, they never said a word …

Singapore 2008

Domenicali’s greatest moment.  Massa was, again, sailing to a simple victory with a dominant display. The first pit stop window was at hand, and there was not one tifoso on the planet who did not feel that sphincter-fist of fear as the TV cameras shifted to Domenicali’s face: Jesus, we thought, surely even he can’t bugger this up, all they need to do is fuel and – please God let them remember the tyres!

At that moment, the world held its breath as Domenicali’s crack team poured out of the pits armed – Dear God, no – with the seer’s newest brain-child, an electronic lollipop with blinking lights and whatnots that heralded the introduction of a system so intricate, so elaborate, so astoundingly brilliant that no team had – or ever has – copied. (I should add, I suppose, that ‘electronic’ would be more apt since there was an organ-grinder somewhere in the background whose job it was to press the green for go button when the pitstop was complete.) You see, the common garden variety lollipop used by the rest of the teams was just too primitive for Domenicali: Those little electronic lights, he knew, was just the ticket to turn his genius … into legend.

The organ-grinder switched the light from red to green. Massa accelerated away to certain victory, carrying with him his entire fuel-rig and half his crew hanging on to it for dear life all the way down pit road while the entire paddock doubled over in hysterics. The TV camera did not focus on Domenicali at this moment, but one can easily imagine his glint of satisfaction as he surveyed the scene and realised the green lights on his special lollipop had worked as planned.

Bernie Ecclestone told The Mail on Sunday, “If the Ferrari president is right about the Singapore Grand Prix being a circus, then we have to be grateful to him for providing the clowns.’

Malaysia 2009

Domenicali is back. During qualifying, the team forgot to send Massa out for a second run: Massa did not get to Q2. But that was just the beginning of Domenicali’s masterplan, a stratagem so cunning, so diabolical, that it would overshadow all the cock-ups that had come before … in one moment, Domenicali had sent a signal to the rest of the paddock: “Last year,” the message read – loud and clear – “I was just practicing. Soon you will see the real Domenicali!”

There was rain in the air, that much is true. And Kimi had to pit because he was at the exit of his fuel-window, this much is also true. Many other cars were in a similar position – both in front and behind Kimi. They all came in, and they all went out on dry tyres because – well, the track, you see, was bone dry.

But Domenicali saw in the sunshine what the others could not: He saw the sky, dark, and in it he saw the future, he saw the Great Flood 2, possibly the very typhoon that he had missed in Fuji in ’07, and in that delirium that so often overcomes the seer, he acted with supreme confidence and determination: Kimi – alone of all the cars – was sent out with full wets onto a dry track. Not intermediates – oh no, no half measures for the ‘seer of Maranello’ – no, full wets for Kimi. One can almost imagine him barking his orders, accepting no arguments from the underlings: “I said wets! Full wets! Do not question my orders!”

F1 is not a science, a famous strategist once said. So let’s look at the reasoning here, if we can: Let us try, for a moment, to ‘be’ Domenicali. We know it’s going to rain, yes. But we also know – and here I hope I am not being presumptuous when I say we and include Domenicali – that, on full wets on a dry track, a car will be 20-30 seconds off the pace per lap, meaning, in one lap, he will have lost any advantage since, you know, it takes 30 seconds to pit for tyres. Which means that, from the moment Kimi was released from the pits, Domenicali was banking on the rain bucketing down no less than half way through the next lap – in other words, he banked that in the span of 50 seconds it would not only rain – which it hadn’t up to that point – but that there would be sufficient rain to make the full wets competitive.

Remarkably, it didn’t rain for 3 more laps, by which time Kimi was (a) a minute down from where he’d been before his stop and (b) with a set of full wets that were now slicks and absolutely useless when the rain did come.

Many a lesser man, at that stage, would be satisfied, and rest on his laurels, but not Domenicali: Oh no, having now effortlessly deep-sixed Kimi’s race, Domenicali turned his all-seeing eyes onto poor Felipe Massa, who has become to Domenicali what Stan was to Laurel, what Pontius was to Jesus …

Having forgotten to send Massa out in qualifying meant the Brazilian could – and did – start the race with an oil-tanker’s worth of fuel, enough to stay out until the rain came (not to mention the cows). Which is what happened: Except that where the others saw drizzle, Domenicali – the ‘seer’ – saw a typhoon, and instead of doing what Glock did and going onto intermediates, Domenicali stuck Massa onto a set of full wets.

But wait! For 5 laps later, when the heavens opened up into the expected deluge, what did Domenicali do? Yes! He brought Massa in for intermediates. And then, wait – one lap later, he brought Massa in again - and stuck him with the same set of full wets he’d had before he came in the lap before!

The circus now moves on to China, and I don’t think you need to be much of a prophet to predict that Domenicali and his ace-team of strategists will keep the paddock guessing as to what comes next.

“The people have to take their own responsibility for things, and this is important in the moment where either from the performance point of view, and the management point of view, things are not going well. This is for sure not acceptable, and I am not accepting that,” said Domenicali. Of course, he himself is not to blame since he does not create disasters – he simply manages them …

Some Quotes From The ‘Seer Of Maranello’ And His Apprentice

“We are very disappointed because, once again today, we leave a circuit empty handed. With hindsight, it’s clear that we took some wrong decisions …” Stefano Domenicali, April 6, 2009

“Unfortunately there was a mistake. It was not an electronic system, it was run manually, because normally in that condition when there are a lot of cars coming in that safety car situation. It is better to have, like, a lollipop, but instead of a lollipop you control the green light and unfortunately there was a mistake.” Stefano Domenicali,  September 29, 2008

“It seems embarrassing to me what has happened in the last few days. We wanted a bigger difference between the winner and the others, instead it stays like 2008. Oh well.” Stefano Domenicali, March 23 2009

“We didn’t lose the championship in Brazil but before, when we had problems with reliability and made mistakes. We have to analyse the causes, with tranquillity but decisively, to be sure that it will not happen again in the next year.” Stefano Domenicali, November 6, 2008

“A Sunday to forget as quickly as possible in terms of the result, although we must remember certain elements of this weekend, as there were mistakes made that we cannot afford to repeat.” Stefano Domenicali, July 7, 2008

“But racing is racing. We’re all human beings and everyone can make a mistake.” Stefano Domenicali, 29 September 2008

“We made mistakes which we have to look at to ensure we don’t do the same again and we also made a few strategy choices, which all things considered turned out to be wrong even if it easy to be wise after the event.” May 5, 2008, Luca Baldisseri

“We left some important points down the road, because of a lack of reliability or because of mistakes on every level. Our situation in the Championship could be much better. Even during a weekend when our performance was much better than the one of our competitors, we risked to not reaching our goal by a defect of some minor detail. We were able and also lucky to bring home Kimi’s car. But this alarm bell has to keep us alert.” Stefano Domenicali